Change and Continuity: Mintzberg and Kotter Agree, You Must Manage Both

"It seems every Business School professor starts by saying how much the world has changed" - that was Henry Mintzberg's opening to a session on change, not unsurprisingly Henry takes a different tack. He points out that continuity is as important as change. We are co-teaching strategy to a group of Chinese executives today, and I had to sheepishly admit I had done just that earlier in the day!

Henry says that we notice what changes, but not those things that endure, that stay the same. Henry persuasively argues that these days, business gurus have got us too focused on what has changed and we thus tend to overlook what stays the same, which is a very big slice of how we do things. What we need to do is manage change and continuity at the same time.

Last night I was reading the cover article of the latest Harvard Business Review. In it John Kotter argues his latest approach to change. John, who is probably the biggest name in leading change, advocates for firms to effectively have 2 operating systems. One operating system is the traditional hierarchical model which we have used for decades and other is built for agility and change.

As John argues, "We cannot ignore the daily demands of running a company, which traditional hierarchies and managerial processes can still do very well. What they do not do well is identify the most important hazards and opportunities early enough, formulate creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implement them fast enough. The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change.

The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do."

What these two business school giants are arguing may well be the same thing. We must manage change and continuity simultaneously. Henry makes the additional point that strategy, for its emergent elements, he really was among the first to write about it - must have an element which lasts for a certain time period in order to qualify as a strategy. The net result is that there is a strong continuity element to strategy and through the emergent side of strategy, a strong need for being open to change. The challenge is to balance the two for the firm, industry and economies that one operates within.